Compromise and Conceit

An old Jedi mind trick

Our guardians in the press are up in arms and all a-fluster in shock that Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway has decided to start referring to blatant lies as “alternative facts.” She was defending the Comical Ali press conference by Trump’s spokesperson, Spicer, which apparently lit up Twitter because of its obvious stupidity, and his blatant yelling attempts to pretend that the Trump inauguration had a greater audience than the 2009 Obama inauguration was presented as “alternative facts” rather than bald-faced bullshit. Spicer even claimed that Trump’s inauguration had the most people ever or something; and this after Trump apparently attempted to get a military parade organized, with tanks and missiles. He also apparently pressured the head of the National Parks Service to find flattering photos that would confirm what he and his crew already knew to be “fact” – that he had a bigger audience than the Kenyan Socialist, even though he obviously, clearly didn’t. It’s telling that having gone looking for evidence to support their view, and having found none, instead of making excuses they simply decided to front up and lie.

The media are shocked and pearl-clutching about how blatantly Trump is rejecting reality. I’m not sure why they’re surprised. The only surprising thing about the whole sordid affair is that Conway was smart enough to come up with a new term for what the Republican party has been doing for years – making up its own facts and expecting the media to swallow them whole, or at least take them seriously. The most obvious example of this is their ongoing project of blatant climate denialism, which the media have abetted for years by allowing the liars, con-artists, grifters and spooks of the GOP denialist wing and all its “think tanks” to come on to shows discussing science and present their bullshit denialism as “balance.” Since the GOP have been coddled for years into believing that complete lies need to be given airtime for reasons of “balance,” why would they not expect the media to give Trump’s view of the inauguration just as much weight as the photographic evidence? The GOP have been denying the temperature curve for years, and sure some of them have gone for a more sophisticated “humans aren’t causing it” line but a large part of the denialism has focused around denying that temperature exists, denying that the curve is rising, slicing the curve up into small parts and claiming cooling, using a different curve (see e.g. Breitbart with its recent attempt to claim the globe is cooling), using a curve that doesn’t measure the earth’s surface, or claiming that the data is all fraudulent. These are surely just as much “alternative facts” as disputing exactly how many people are in two separate photographs of the national mall.

If the media blessed the last 15 years of abject denialist bullshit with the halo of truthiness, why would they expect the GOP to stop there? And it’s not just on matters of policy that they know the GOP lies: Paul Ryan – who the media insist on pretending is a serious policy thinker – has been caught out lying flagrantly about his own marathon times, no doubt in order to burnish his manly credentials for his far right base and to keep the media hanging onto his strange, blank-eyed granny-starving charm so they can keep pretending he’s not just another shallow tax fetishist. The GOP were also pretty good at pretending that the national debt Clinton inherited was not Bush’s fault, and that the national debt Obama inherited was not Bush’s fault – and the media pretty much let them have that as well. Which has also enabled the GOP to keep up their image as the party of serious deficit reduction and concern about “inter-generational equity” when in fact they are the biggest culprits for the ballooning federal debt, and only ever take deficits seriously when a Democrat is in charge. And wasn’t it the PNAC that said that the only limits to American power were their imagination, just before they fucked up and invaded Iraq?

The GOP and the rarified “thinkers” in “think” tanks like the Heritage foundation associated with this clan of grifters have pushed a whole bunch of other lies and deceptions over the years that are easily just as blatant as Spicer’s recent “alternative facts”: more guns means less crime, the Clean Air Act didn’t work, Barack Obama was born in Kenya, the Laffer curve, abstinence only sex education works, the Empire were the good guys (seriously there is a dude at National Review who runs with this particular shtick). They also peddle in a sideline of hypocrisy that would get a Democrat sunk in a moment – most obviously the wide array of “family values” candidates like Gingrich and Trump who’re onto their third marriage, and the rogue’s gallery of anti-gay lawmakers who have been caught adopting a “wide stance” in public toilets. They’ve been able to get away with this mixture of blatant denialism, straight-up lies, prevarications and half truths, and rank hypocrisy for the past 30 years because the media have been noticable lax about confronting them on the obvious con they’re running. Now the media have a president who really genuinely hates them and they’re suddenly starting to notice that taking facts seriously matters. But they’ve done the GOP’s work for them, allowing every single important issue of the past 30 years to be turned into a matter of opinion and “balance”, making every single basic fact underlying public policy into a debatable issue, and now Trump and his team of rich ingrates have decided they don’t need to pay lip service to the truth anymore. Having shown themselves to be willing enablers of GOP lies for 30 years, it’s going to be a little difficult for the media to back away and start pretending that facts matter.

I’ve been saying for a long time now that the GOP cannot behave like a serious political party while it denies global warming, and that the effort required to deny global warming has corrupted the entire intellectual structure of American conservatism. This is why now the GOP has become the home of vaccine denialism, with Trump considering appointing an open denialist to the vaccine safety committee, and why the GOP cannot come up with a health care policy or a strategy to contain gun violence: The effort of denying the facts of global warming has required such a complete and overwhelming rejection of the basic tenets of modern intellectual activity that they have had to walk away from reality to manage it. Just as the torturer in 1984 forced Winston to lie about the most basic things in order to rebuild his ideology, so the GOP have developed in themselves the ability to lie to themselves about anything, no matter how obvious and simple, and now it’s easy for them to believe anything they want to believe. To convince a Republican of the wrongness of vaccination policy or the fact that homeopathy can cure AIDS you don’t need to sell them on pseudo-scientific waffle – you just need to show them how it matches their ideology, and they’ll automatically believe the rest. This is what happened with anti-vaccination ideology, and it happens by default with any environmental issue. In time it will happen with everything else, because the GOP is intellectually rudderless, has built an entire intellectual structure on no foundations.

Over the term of this presidency that means that the president, all his sycophants, and most of the GOP congress are going to present us a range of ridiculous ideas that are clearly wrong, and yet believe them wholeheartedly: Trump will be “ever more popular” even as his popularity plummets; their Obamacare replacement will be enormously successful even though it is a dismal failure; crime will plummet even if it goes up; the economy will be going great even as inflation and unemployment rise. They have finally and completely severed themselves from reality and even though the rest of us have seen this coming for 30 years, their compliant operatives in the media have just noticed just how far gone the whole screaming mad mob are. But by the time they try to start dealing with it, Trump will have cut them off completely and withdrawn into his Fox news bubble. After all, once you completely reject all facts, you don’t need the media to report anything, do you? You can just make proclamations of the truth, and the more pesky fact-checkers you cut out of the process the easier it is to promulgate the truth.

This day has been coming for 30 years, and we scientists have been warning of it for a long time. I fear it is going to be a long time before America can drag itself back from this state, and that it will do a lot of damage to itself and the rest of the world before it finally recovers. Let’s hope the damage isn’t fatal …